Longhand
Persistent local memory for Claude Code. Every tool call, every file edit, every thinking block from every Claude Code session — stored verbatim on your machine. Searchable, replayable, and recallable by fuzzy natural-language questions. Zero API calls. Zero summaries. Zero decisions made by an AI about what's worth remembering.
Claude Code quietly rotates your session files after a few weeks. Longhand captures them into SQLite before they're gone. Once ingested, your history stays forever — even after the source JSONL files are deleted. Install early; the past you don't capture is unrecoverable.
If you have 20+ Claude Code sessions in ~/.claude/projects/, Longhand can find any fix, decision, or conversation you've had in ~126ms — without a single API call.
Does it use a lot of tokens? No — every tool is capped by design. A full recall across 100+ sessions returns ~4K tokens. Reading one raw session JSONL costs 10–50× more. See Token budget.
pip install longhand
longhand setup # ingest history + install hooks + configure MCP
longhand recall "that stripe webhook bug from last week"
Want to kick the tires first? Run longhand demo for a 60-second walkthrough on a fake 3-session sample corpus — your real ~/.claude and ~/.longhand are not touched. The demo seeds a sandboxed store with a Stripe-webhook bug + Supabase auth migration + downstream 401 fix, then runs cross-session recall and project-status so you can see what the output looks like before committing.
pip install longhand
longhand demo # sandboxed; cleans up afterwards (pass --keep to explore)
Upgrading to 0.9.0? Live ingestion captures sessions in flight, plan history is preserved as first-class data, and an optional reconciler job keeps the index honest in the background:
- New
longhand ingest-live command runs from Claude Code's Stop hook to tail the active transcript between assistant turns. Sessions show up in recall while you're still working, not after they end.
- New
longhand plans list command and list_plans MCP tool surface every Write/Edit to ~/.claude/plans/*.md across your entire history. Plans are now extracted as their own entity alongside episodes.
- New
longhand schedule install-reconciler installs an optional launchd job that runs reconcile --fix periodically — catches anything the live and post-session hooks missed without you ever thinking about it.
- The Stop hook coexists with the existing SessionEnd hook: live tails the transcript as it grows; SessionEnd does the full analysis pass when the session closes.
Upgrading to 0.8.1? Staleness signals now propagate everywhere they belong, and reconcile is an MCP tool — Claude can self-heal the index from inside a session:
search and list_sessions now wrap the response with stale: true + stale_reason when the project they're scoped to has on-disk transcripts not yet ingested. Pre-v0.8.1 these returned clean-looking empty results (same silent-failure shape recall_project_status was built to catch — just one layer up).- New
reconcile MCP tool wraps longhand reconcile --fix. After a staleness banner fires, Claude calls reconcile directly instead of asking the user to run a CLI command.
list_sessions default limit raised from 20 to 50 — active days routinely cross 5+ projects across 5+ sessions; the old default truncated reviews silently.
Upgrading from 0.7.x or earlier? Cleaner recall narratives, plus a real bug-finding test layer underneath (from 0.8.0):
